Last week saw the latest publication of the Commonwealth Bank’s Legal Market Pulse Report. What was a quarterly report, became half yearly, and would now appear to be annual (a great shame if true as many of us saw this report as an important benchmark of how the industry was tracking).

Anyhow, leaving that aside – and despite some changes to the structure of the report (it seems to be missing growth practice and geographic areas for example – which I loved), it remains an important read for those of us in #Auslaw.

But now a brief rant:- as you would expect of a report researched/undertaken by Beaton (which I understand is the case), it’s almost zealous like in its consideration/debate of so-called ‘NewLaw’ versus ‘BigLaw’ (do a search of the term ‘NewLaw’ and see how many hits you get if you don’t believe me!).

And I don’t get this ongoing fixation.

And yes, I was part of the twitter conversation that saw the birth of the term NewLaw by Eric Chin (who was then at Beaton) and thought it to be an interesting term/concept at the time.

But I’m starting to seriously wonder if we haven’t moved on from all this? If, indeed, once again, we are having the wrong conversation.

So what I want to ask is this:

Shouldn’t we start to have a real discussion about whether or not your firm is ‘full service’ (BigLaw) or ‘specialised’ (NewLaw) – and what that actually means; rather than NewLaw versus BigLaw, with all the inferences that come with that around old ways of doing law versus new ways?

Because I genuinely believe that in a market that is increasingly hard to differentiate in, this is a far more important question.

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